Fossil Fuel CO2 Emissions

Humanity is charging the modern civilization engine with fossil fuels. As a result, vast amount of carbon emissions are released in the air every year since the onset of industrial era. We all know and hopefully also agree that carbon itself and carbon dioxide particularly are the key drivers of the global climate change nowadays. But how do we get the global information about the released amount of carbon after we use fossil fuel for producing energy, charging our industry and for transportation needs? The team of NIES (National Institute of Environmental Science) from Japan has produced ODIAC emission datasets to answer this question. The estimates are based on spaceborne observation of night-lights and energy use statistics. This map reflects spatial distribution of carbon emissions from fuel combustion and cement production. Despite this dataset demonstrate spatially explicit features of the emissions humans produce, many things about emissions are still obscure. How accurate are energy statistics in the developing countries (see these strangely low values of CO2 emissions over Western Africa)? Can we consistently validate national reports using observations in near future? Are there any missing components in combustion process that can lead to underestimation of carbon release? Hopefully, some of these questions can be answered after NASA will launch OCO-3 mission. Meanwhile, the scientists can benefit from these datasets and bystanders can enjoy nice visualization.